“If I advocate cautious optimism it is not because I do not have faith in the future but because I do not want to encourage blind faith.”

There is nothing to compare with the courage of ordinary people whose names are unknown and whose sacrifices pass unnoticed.

The viewpoint of the privileged is unlike that of the underprivileged.

I think people prefer the good to win, rather than the bad.

All right, your knees may be knocking but that shouldn’t prevent you from going ahead and doing what you need to do.

Democracy, like liberty, justice and other social and political rights, is not “given”, it is earned through courage, resolution and sacrifice.

I think sometimes if you are alone, you are freer because your time is your own.

As I travel through my country, people often ask me how it feels to have been imprisoned in my home -first for six years, then for 19 months.

Humor is one of the best ingredients of survival.

To the best of my knowledge, no war was ever started by women. But it is women and children who have always suffered most in situations of conflict.

Some of the most relaxing weekends I have ever enjoyed were those I spent quietly with a sense of all work to date completed, and an absorbing mystery.

The relentless attempts of totalitarian regimes to prevent free thought and new ideas and the persistent assertion of their own rightness bring on them an intellectual stasis which they project on to the nation at large.

The education and empowerment of women throughout the world cannot fail to result in a more caring, tolerant, just and peaceful life for all.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes that ‘if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression’, human rights should be protected by the rule of law.

If you’re feeling helpless, help someone.

Please use your freedom to promote ours.

More people, especially young people, are realising that if they want change, they’ve got to go about it themselves – they can’t depend on a particular person, ie me, to do all the work. They are less easy to fool than they used to be, they now know what’s going on all over the world.

The advocates of public control cannot do without inflation. They need it in order to finance their policy of reckless spending and of lavishly subsidizing and bribing the voters.

The first moment of an universal republic would convert me into an advocate for single and uncontradicted despotism.

The first duty of a wise advocate is to convince his opponents that he understands their arguments, and sympathies with their just feelings.

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies.

I’ve advocated a proportional tax system. You make $10 billion, you pay a billion. You make $10, you pay one. And everybody gets treated the same way.

Why is it that scuba divers and surfers are some of the strongest advocates of ocean conservation? Because they’ve spent time in and around the ocean, and they’ve personally seen the beauty.

I have never advocated war except as a means of peace.

Head lice have their own animal-rights group, or may as well. The National Pediculosis Association doesn’t exactly advocate letting lice live with dignity, but it does oppose pediculicidal treatments.